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Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary
action? Or are we to take it that, while we may well enquire in
the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and
hesitating power, the gods must be declared omnipotent, not
merely some things but all lying at their nod? Or is power
entire, freedom of action in all things, to be reserved to one
alone, of the rest some being powerful, others powerless, others
again a blend of power and impotence?
All this must come to the test: we must dare it even of the
Firsts and of the All-Transcendent and, if we find omnipotence
possible, work out how far freedom extends. The very notion of
power must be scrutinized lest in this ascription we be really
making power identical with Essential Act, and even with Act not
yet achieved.
But for the moment we may pass over these questions to deal with
the traditional problem of freedom of action in ourselves.
To begin with, what must be intended when we assert that
something is in our power; what is the conception here?
To establish this will help to show whether we are to ascribe
freedom to the gods and still more to God, or to refuse it, or
again, while asserting it, to question still, in regard both to
the higher and lower- the mode of its presence.
What then do we mean when we speak of freedom in ourselves and
why do we question it?
My own reading is that, moving as we do amid adverse fortunes,
compulsions, violent assaults of passion crushing the soul,
feeling ourselves mastered by these experiences, playing slave to
them, going where they lead, we have been brought by all this to
doubt whether we are anything at all and dispose of ourselves in
any particular.
This would indicate that we think of our free act as one which we
execute of our own choice, in no servitude to chance or necessity
or overmastering passion, nothing thwarting our will; the
voluntary is conceived as an event amenable to will and occurring
or not as our will dictates. Everything will be voluntary that is
produced under no compulsion and with knowledge; our free act is
what we are masters to perform.
Differing conceptually, the two conditions will often coincide
but sometimes will clash. Thus a man would be master to kill, but
the act will not be voluntary if in the victim he had failed to
recognise his own father. Perhaps however that ignorance is not
compatible with real freedom: for the knowledge necessary to a
voluntary act cannot be limited to certain particulars but must
cover the entire field. Why, for example, should killing be
involuntary in the failure to recognise a father and not so in
the failure to recognise the wickedness of murder? If because the
killer ought to have learned, still ignorance of the duty of
learning and the cause of that ignorance remain alike
involuntary.
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